days of rest

Posted on 1. June 2013

A busy week lies behind me. And when I say busy I mean this superbusy kind of thing which hardly leaves you time to breathe deeply once in a while.

So what was going on? I decided to re-work my patterns. All of them. I wanted them to have the same layout, to have schematics where they make sense, to use the same style sheet and to all have the same look and feel about them.

Now, when I had the idea it sounded like a great one to me, but somehow I had underestimated the amount of work I had to put into this. I currently have 27 patterns online, each translated into two or three languages, which left me with about 70 files I had to re-work. Not to mention drawing schematics, editing photos, adding romance blurps, proofreading everything again and again and trying to keep my inner sanity while doing all this…

René was super thoughtful with me and gave me as much room and time as possible, but our nerves really wore thin by the end of the week.

But (and stories like this always have a “but” to them, no?) finally I was done. It’s just a great feeling to be done, really. I can have a coffee now all in peace, without worrying if I maybe forgot something (no, I didn’t. I checked a million times, really) or thoughts like “I’ll never finish this, how the hell could I ever think it was a great idea?!” or putting the kids off because no, I don’t have time to build a LEGO tower now and I can’t watch you dance either.

It’s wonderful to have time again.

What do you do when you have time? When all work is done and you can totally freely decide what you want to do?

For me, honestly, it’s always been knitting. When I started to knit this was a calming counterpole to my stressful everyday life. Evenings on the couch with my knitting basket right next to me, sometimes listening to an audiobook and rejoycing in the slow but steady progress of my work.

But things have changed. Knitting has become (one of) my job(s) now and I never knit “only” for the fun of it. I still love knitting, of course, but it is not my place to find rest and peace anymore. Deadlines are pressing, I have todo lists longer than one page of paper (which makes me nervous if I think too much about this fact) and I’m even playing with the thought of making knitwear design my day job, which brings up even more annoying things to think about like health insurance, pension insurance, our mortgage and, and, and…

So just recently I picked up an old hobby of mine again.

I’ve always been amazed by drawing. I could watch artists hours and hours with increasing enthusiasm, totally struck by their talent and skill.

I don’t feel I have talent for this myself, but this doesn’t keep me from scribbling. And I do feel that it’s a lot about technique which is in fact learnable. And the point that I don’t HAVE to learn it at all keeps my mind at ease. Yes, I want to become better, but I have no deadlines and no pressure at all. If I scribble for the next five years, that’s totally fine for me as well. (Of course, being able to quickly sketch a fashion croquis IS a useful thing for a fashion designer which will surely prove useful for me in the future. But this is not the reason I’m doing this.)

And of course, picking this as a hobby gives me the wonderful excuse to spend money on things like paper notebook, pens and markers. I really fall for this.

This is my small, but growing, collection of COPIC markers.

They’re a great tool and just so much fun to use. The downside is, they’re rather expensive. You can easily spend a couple of hundred dollars for a set of them, and this is far more than I feel would be reasonable for now. But it’s ok – as I said, I allow myself to progress slowly.